Technology has transformed all aspects of our lives, including what it means to be informed, knowledgeable, and creative. A Personal Knowledge Base (PKB) using the “cloud” application Evernote can be used to accumulate resources related to science, science teaching and other topics of your choosing. Your PKB is an online repository for articles, notes, references, and reflections, and is meant to extend your intelligence and creativity. Since everyone thinks in his or her own way, our PKBs should also be different. Your PKB reflection should describe:
I see Evernote as a very powerful tool. It is a fantastic filing system that is available on all of my devices so I can access the info anywhere. I have found that computer version is the most useful as it has more options available.
I have mostly education related content. I have lots of education articles about teaching and I also have a lot of content related to teaching biology. If I find an interesting idea, video or image I clip it. I found it particularly useful in clipping a bunch of online articles I wanted students to read in my lesson plan. The clipping feature keeps the original website location but also captures the text so if the article is removed you still have the content. I also liked how the clipping tool only clips the text so that any of the side bars and ads are not included. This works great for when I plan on printing clipped articles for students to read.
I struggle the most creating a cohesive organizational scheme. I generally find I have a lot of notebooks and in each theme notebook I have notes which may or may not be named well. I am able to find things now because of my many notebooks but in the long run I need to improve this system. I need to make time to sit down and develop a better organization scheme. I think the tagging with key words and a specific naming scheme will help.
The way I see Evernote helping with professional learning is in keeping things organized and accessible. Often we have so many good ideas and information thrown at us it is hard to keep track or remember them. It is not hard to find great ideas. The challenge is in taking the time to think more about them, to actually attempt to use them, and then to reflect on how it went. Evernote helps to capture the ideas and it could be useful for reflections after you try the ideas. I did not find clipping lots of articles every week that we never read in full nor discussed with anyone very useful. I think capturing really quality pieces or articles more useful than collecting articles that we may read in more depth some other day. I find discussing ideas with other teachers useful. Collecting the info is just a very small part of professional development.
My challenge in using Evernote right now is time. I am not sure if that issue will go away but I am hoping when I do not have to work full time and take a full load of classes I will have more time to take advantage of the power of evernote. I feel like I always feel when I start with a new piece of software. It is confusing to start and you often take much longer to do simple things but overtime everything gets faster. I had wanted to try to use evernote to organize all my notes for a research paper I was writing (in an attempt to go paperless) however I struggled. I wanted to read articles on my ipad instead of my laptop but clipping out piece of text was hard on the ipad. I also find that I do not like to read digitally when I am taking notes because it is hard for me to underline and mark up the text. I need to play around with this more when it is not such high stake as writing a paper by a deadline.
I see Evernote as a very powerful tool. It is a fantastic filing system that is available on all of my devices so I can access the info anywhere. I have found that computer version is the most useful as it has more options available.
I have mostly education related content. I have lots of education articles about teaching and I also have a lot of content related to teaching biology. If I find an interesting idea, video or image I clip it. I found it particularly useful in clipping a bunch of online articles I wanted students to read in my lesson plan. The clipping feature keeps the original website location but also captures the text so if the article is removed you still have the content. I also liked how the clipping tool only clips the text so that any of the side bars and ads are not included. This works great for when I plan on printing clipped articles for students to read.
I struggle the most creating a cohesive organizational scheme. I generally find I have a lot of notebooks and in each theme notebook I have notes which may or may not be named well. I am able to find things now because of my many notebooks but in the long run I need to improve this system. I need to make time to sit down and develop a better organization scheme. I think the tagging with key words and a specific naming scheme will help.
The way I see Evernote helping with professional learning is in keeping things organized and accessible. Often we have so many good ideas and information thrown at us it is hard to keep track or remember them. It is not hard to find great ideas. The challenge is in taking the time to think more about them, to actually attempt to use them, and then to reflect on how it went. Evernote helps to capture the ideas and it could be useful for reflections after you try the ideas. I did not find clipping lots of articles every week that we never read in full nor discussed with anyone very useful. I think capturing really quality pieces or articles more useful than collecting articles that we may read in more depth some other day. I find discussing ideas with other teachers useful. Collecting the info is just a very small part of professional development.
My challenge in using Evernote right now is time. I am not sure if that issue will go away but I am hoping when I do not have to work full time and take a full load of classes I will have more time to take advantage of the power of evernote. I feel like I always feel when I start with a new piece of software. It is confusing to start and you often take much longer to do simple things but overtime everything gets faster. I had wanted to try to use evernote to organize all my notes for a research paper I was writing (in an attempt to go paperless) however I struggled. I wanted to read articles on my ipad instead of my laptop but clipping out piece of text was hard on the ipad. I also find that I do not like to read digitally when I am taking notes because it is hard for me to underline and mark up the text. I need to play around with this more when it is not such high stake as writing a paper by a deadline.